For A Friend

I had stories, I had poems, I had songs. Where did you take them? It’s like you’ve snatched the words from my head and put yourself in their place. Well, maybe I don’t want you in my head. Maybe I want what I had before – the stories I could tell.

But that’s life, and I’m stuck with you for the time being, and I don’t know whether you’ll get out again.

You say I’m in your head. You say what I write is beautiful.

And now you’ve taken away that ability?

People ask me why I haven’t been posting, why I’ve not been sending them any novels. I know it’s stupid to blame it on you because I spend about half the year in forced productivity and half of it like this, stuck, yet I do. You have taken my words, and you have not given them back.

I am not your Jennie, Alex, for all I wish I was. I’m just an idiot pretending to be someone she isn’t, an idiot trying to get through this without anyone realising how little I really know. I’m just an idiot who relied on words to express herself and vent her feelings – and then found, just when she needed them, that they abandoned her.

At some points in our life we have a lot of words. When we’re hurting, there are often so many poems we can write. But this isn’t a pain I’ve felt before, not one I’ve really read about. This is a pain that I have to deal with on my own, because my words have abandoned me.